blaze

README

Blaze calculator

I wanted to build a Spotlight alternative for Linux and decided to start implementing the calculator.

I skipped all the GUI, as I wanted to get a working prototype as soon as possible.

This turned out very useful even without the rest of Spotlight's features, so here it is.

Absolutely experimental, use at your own risk.

Build / Install

To get started quickly, run the following command to install blaze in your $GOPATH/bin:

go install github.com/francescobbo/blaze@latest

If you want to build from source:

git clone https://github.com/francescobbo/blaze.git
cd blaze
go generate ./...
go build

You can also run the tests:

go test ./...

Built with AI

This project started off with a heavy reliance on AI for code generation. In just a few hours of work there was a decent working prototype with a "handcrafted" tokenizer, parser and evaluator.

Since I wanted to add more complexity to the project, I decided to rewrite the tokenizer and parser with ANTLR4. LLMs still helped crafting the grammar, but failed miserably when it came to visiting the parse tree.

Example

How to use

1. Clone the repository
2. Compile the code: go build
3. Run the code: ./blaze
4. Type in your math expression, the program will print the result as you type.

Features

1. Real-time evaluation of mathematical expressions
2. Basic arithmetic operations: +, -, *, /, ^ (or **)
3. Nested expressions with parentheses
4. Percentages (e.g., 10% * 200, 10% of 200)
5. Modulo operation (e.g., 10 % 3, 10 mod 3)
6. Constants: pi, e, phi
7. Trigonometric functions: sin, cos, tan, asin, acos, atan
8. Logarithmic functions: log, ln
9. Square root: sqrt
10. Copy the result to clipboard by pressing Enter
11. Unit conversions:
    • weight (10 kg to oz)
    • length (10 m to yd)
    • area (10 sqm to sqft)
    • volume (10 L to cup)
    • time (1d to s)
    • temperature (0c to f)
12. Currency conversion: 10 usd to eur, 10 eur to usd, 1 btc to usd
13. All of the above can be combined in a single expression:
    • 10 usd to eur * 5 + 10%
    • sqrt(10 kg in g)
    • cos(2pi) * 2 btc to usd

Note: currency rates are obtained from ExchangeRate-API and Coinbase API.

Currency rates are cached for 1 hour (1 minute for cryptocurrencies) to avoid hitting the API too frequently. The cache is stored in an appropriate location based on the OS (see appDataPath)